How I came to accept my above-average height 

“My posture was always slightly hunched due in part to my crippling anxiety, but also in a subconscious attempt to seem smaller than I was.”

I wasn’t always tall. Growing up I was definitely on the shorter end of the spectrum, but I wasn’t short. To put it simply, I went through puberty later than my peers. I never questioned or fretted about my height until I was about 15. When I look back, it feels like it happened overnight – suddenly, I was on the taller side of average.  

My self-conscious, awkwardly tall adolescent self was distraught. I was already riddled with insecurities, and now I felt like I had another thing to feel terrible about. Of course, writing this now, I’m thinking ‘Wow, the drama level is off the charts’, but I think that’s kind of the point. Although I wasn’t a quintessential teenage girl, I did have a flair for the dramatics (and I still do, if I’m being honest). 

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For the next few years, I obsessed over my height. I constantly berated myself about my physical attributes. It was a pretty toxic combination of depression mixed with regular adolescent insecurities. I frequently analysed the heights of everyone around me, assessing if they were ‘too tall’, ‘too short’, or the perfect medium I lusted after. 

I irritated my family to no end with an annoying habit of googling the heights of the actors in everything we watched on TV together. After performing my investigations, I would read the results out loud for everyone to hear. Relaxing in front of the television after dinner as a family soon became a fraught activity thanks to my penchant for voicing my neuroses out loud. 

Meanwhile, heels were avoided at all costs – which was deeply sad, because I am, fundamentally, a heels girl – as I didn’t want to appear any taller than I already was. My posture was always slightly hunched due in part to my crippling anxiety, but also in a subconscious attempt to seem smaller than I was. 

Self-harm and an eating disorder were added into the mix, which resulted in a pretty miserable few years. Whether it was my height, my weight, my thighs, my skin, or even the width of my fingernails (weird, I know), I was a walking bundle of low self-esteem. 

The combination of working on recovering from an eating disorder and a lot of time passing meant I slowly began to learn that my body is my body and I can’t change that fact (or rather, I shouldn’t have to). Boiling that lesson down and summing it up in one sentence feels unbelievably simplified, but in a way, it’s a really simple concept. The hard part is coming to terms with that fact and then accepting yourself just as you are. 

I’m still buried deep in the process of accepting who I am – after all, I’m only at the very beginning of my twenties (something I have to remind myself of often). I think true self-acceptance is often something that you don’t reach until later in life. And if you do achieve it earlier than that, then lucky you! I’m envious. But for me, I see it all as a long journey and one that I’m grateful to be on. 

Now, at 21 years old, I stand at about 5’9’ (175cm). It’s a height that I now (mostly) love and accept. Of course, there are exceptions to this, because I’m human. Sometimes, when I’m feeling generally shitty, I’ll feel myself revert back to my old ways of thinking – ‘You’re too tall, everyone is staring at you’ – but I’ve gained the ability to shake these thoughts off, with the knowledge that I am perfect just as I am (my mantra, as of late). 

And don’t get me wrong; I’m always a little bit concerned with the height of any potential romantic partners, but I think that’s just residual teenage insecurity. In the past, I definitely subscribed to the idea that the men I date should be taller than me. My friend Maggie Zhou has written about this previously, but I’m in the process of detaching myself from this particular ‘rule’.

It’s all a process, but I’m getting there. So, wear the heels, be the taller one and shrug those doubts off your shoulders. That’s what I’ll be doing.